


Never Learned

by Roswellian



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Homesickness, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-26
Updated: 2016-01-26
Packaged: 2018-05-16 09:46:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5823865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roswellian/pseuds/Roswellian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There were things his mother never told him, like how to leave home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Learned

**Author's Note:**

> This was a prompt from @birddad on tumblr. If you like this please considering finding me on tumblr @roswell-talk and reblogging this on tumblr [at this post here.](http://roswell-talk.tumblr.com/post/138082883020/petrichor-with-poe-solo-or-shippy-is-fine) []()

There were things his mother never told him. Maybe she died too early. Maybe she saw him take root in the land and thought that he’d never be seduced to the pilot’s life. Maybe she thought Poe’s father, a man gentler in teaching than she could ever manage, would handle the softer parts of growing up. Maybe she could never find the words.

Poe did not blame her for it, not really, or not beyond the vague wish that she was there to explain it now.

There were things his mother never told him. In space you forgot things. You could loose whole worlds to the void if you were not careful. After a few months working off a Navy Cruiser, flying more than sleeping, the whole concept of dirt became a foreign country. How, he wondered, was he supposed to remember what the blue of the sky was like when he was up here. Last time he was not separated from certain death by three centimeters of metal was uncountable weeks behind him.

“What’s a tree?” he joked with Karè.

“I think the ghost of the color green is haunting me,” she laughed, but they both saw the wistful look she shoot the block of protein and nutrients that lay on her tray. He missed vegetables. He missed digging them from the soil with his hands and slicing them thin enough to fry in seconds. He missed the labor of it.

Maybe his mother had never felt the disconnection that he felt and thus never could have known to warn him. Maybe she, unlike him, had never loved the ground at all and even on the world which she called home she was an interloper divorced temporarily from the stars. She was the better pilot, after all.

There were things his mother never told him. Even when you drink the medically mandated 2.5 liters of water a day your body will ache for rain. Condensation, Poe hypothesized, was lie told by bad people to good soldiers who has forgotten what anything but recycled air tasted like. And fog, well, fog was not so much a lie as as a myth or legend long ago dismissed as fiction.

 _Abuela,_ he wrote home, _¿están allí los monzónes? ¿Se desbordó el rio este año?_

By the time she wrote back the rivers were running dry and his cousin’s took siestas not in the cool season’s customary dogpile but stretched in the shade touching as little as possible. He knew this and yet he dreamed of that golden hour before a storm breaks when the air is thick and traps the populace like bugs in ancient amber.

There were things his mother never told him. One day everyone stands somewhere that is not their home and finds despite this that there has been a homecoming. Maybe she did not feel the need to warn him, for finding a home should be a surprise. Maybe her homecoming had been to Kesera, with his hands too soft for a soldier, and not to a place at all. Maybe she had not even thought to warn him.

The resistance base was not Yavin. He still woke missing the thunderous bird call that proceeded dawn and that had marked out the mornings of his childhood. There were no bats chirping in the dark and no gaggle of cousins who he was supposed to watch. But he was home in a way that he had not been for a long time.

General Organa found him by the lake, pants rolled up, shin deep in rich mud. He paused in his reveling to watch her approach with stately certainty.

“Enjoying your self Commander Dameron?” She asked.  

“It’s good to see the ground again, General.” Poe said.

“Ah,” she sighed, “so you’re not one of those after all.”

“One of those, Ma’am?” Confusion and worry bloomed within his chest and across his face, “I’m…. sorry?” he said uncertainly. He was not quite sure what the rules were here, away form the base, away from the situation room.

That really made her laugh. “No need to apologize, Dameron. You’re not someone like my dear husband, someone more at home in metal than in mud. You’ve got wind in your lungs and rain in your blood. That’s good. It means I can trust you to know what we’re fighting for.”

“Yes, Ma’am” Poe said with a muddy salute.

“There’s no need to call me ma’am. In the command room I’m your General but not here.” She said. Muscle by muscle she relaxed her war creased face. It was neat trick, to go from royalty to soldier in the space of a moment. Poe wished he could do that but he was only ever a soldier, never a prince. “I knew your parents, both of them were good people. Your mother was a particular friend of mine.”

“I know.” Poe said softly.

“I just wanted to pay my respects. Tell you I’m sorry for your loss.” She sighed. “I valued her skill and her honesty.”

“I miss her,” Poe said candidly having made the decision that the general would understand, “sometimes too much, but it was a long time ago.”

Leia seemed disinclined to speak. She looked out over the lake. Poe looked at her. He had dreamed for a long time of being a confidant of the general, of being her right hand man. This was different though. It was not but a moment of shared respect. He looked down at where the edges of the lake swallowed his feet, wiggled his toes, let the muck ground him on this new planet.

“She died in the skies you know,” he said at last, “she died in her ship.”

“For that,” Leia said, “I am eternally grateful.”

There were things his mother never told him. She never told him that war is mostly waiting. She never told him that even the best soldiers wake up one day and just want to go home.

Poe sat by Finn’s bedside and waited and wanted to go home. He was used to waiting, for crops to grow, for orders, for letters from home, but he had not dreamed of Yavin this vividly for a long time. Not since he had joined the resistance. Not since his first 4-month rotation on a navy warship. It was like he could taste the tamales steaming and actually hear the evening winds wuthering around his attic room.

He woke to the soft glow of machinery and was for a moment convinced that it was instead the pale glow of the force-tree’s branches scratching at his window.

“Are you crying?” Finn asked from the bed.

“Oh, you’re up.” Poe said ignoring the question.

“Yeah I woke up a few hours ago. The Doctor filled me in on what’s been going on but she wouldn’t let me wake you up.”

“I wanted to be here when you woke up,” he said trying to hid his disappointment, “You must have been bored, just staring at my sleeping mug.”

“Nah,” Finn gestured to the tiny window set high in the wall, “I was watching the rain. It’s so strange.”

“What…” Poe spluttered.

“Jakku was my first deployment.” He said with a tiny grimace, “I saw rain in simulations, of course, and a once or twice since they took us off base as children. But seeing it real and now is…”

“Look, buddy” Poe said conspiratorially, his heart pounding with ugly pity and the desire to say the right thing, “don’t tell anybody but the next time it rains I’m going to bust you out of here. You’ve got to smell the dawn after a rain storm.”

“Smell the dawn?” Finn whispered.

“Yeah.” Poe said and they both busted out laughing filling the medical bay with the sound of them.

There were things his mother never told him. People are foreign countries, distant worlds. Their dirt is not your dirt, their weather is not your weather. Sometimes you will not be able to speak in the right language or know the songs to sing to them. Bu sometimes learning them for yourself is enough.

 


End file.
